Intracorporeal medical devices such as guide wires and stents have revolutionized modern medicine by allowing medical care providers to insert cameras and mechanical devices into blood vessels and urinary tubes. These medical devices allow for blood vessels and urinary tubes to be imaged and treated without the need for more invasive surgical procedures. However, the insertion of these medical devices into blood vessels and urinary tracts can lead to abrasions on the inner surface of the vessels if the devices do not easily slide along the surface of the vessel walls. These scratches can cause a failure of the vessel walls or a thickening of the vessel walls that lead to constriction of the diameter of the vessel.
Lubricious coatings have been developed that provide the coated medical devices with a low coefficient of friction when the coating becomes wet. However, the development of lubricious coatings presents a different set of challenges due to the inherently high risks of device failure during invasive medical procedures. The coating must adhere strongly to the
medical device, because if the coating were to delaminate, then the delaminated film could form a catastrophic blockage of a blood vessel. At the same time, the same coating must also provide a low adhesion, low friction surface on the exterior of the coating to avoid damaging the blood vessels that the medical device must move through.
Past efforts to develop lubricious coatings have been directed toward the development of interpenetrating networks (IPNs) that formed a first network of cross linked polymers in the presence of a second network of cross linked polymers to provide a coating having the adhesive properties of the first network along with the lubricious properties of the second network. See, for example, U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 2013/0123664, 2012/0077049, and 2009/0041923.
Despite these advances, there is a need for a coating that can adhere strongly to a section of a medical device while providing an exterior surface having high lubricity.